Computing system emulates human brain

IBM and five leading universities have been awarded $4.9 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The goal is to create computing systems that will emulate the brain's abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition while rivaling its low power consumption and compact size.
The amount of digital data is growing at a mind-boggling 60 percent each year. But without the ability to monitor, analyze and react to this information in real-time, the majority of its value may be lost. Cognitive computing offers the promise of systems that can integrate and analyze vast amounts of data from many sources in the blink of an eye, allowing businesses or individuals to make rapid decisions in time to have a significant impact. A cognitive computer, emulating a brain, could quickly and accurately put together the disparate pieces of relevant information and help people make good decisions rapidly.
By seeking inspiration from the structure, dynamics, function, and behavior of the brain, the researchers aim to break the conventional programmable machine paradigm. Ultimately, they hope to rival the brain's low power consumption and small size by using nanoscale devices for synapses and neurons. This technology stands to bring about entirely new computing architectures and programming paradigms. The end goal: ubiquitously deployed computers imbued with a new intelligence that can integrate information from a variety of sensors and sources, deal with ambiguity, respond in a context-dependent way, learn over time and carry out pattern recognition to solve difficult problems based on perception, action and cognition in complex, real-world environments.
This research project is the first phase of DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) initiative. Initial research will focus on demonstrating nanoscale, low power synapse-like devices and on uncovering the functional microcircuits of the brain. The long-term mission is to demonstrate low-power, compact cognitive computers that approach mammalian-scale intelligence.